


Gift-Wrapped

by iberiandoctor (jehane)



Category: DC Extended Universe, DCU (Comics), Justice League (2017)
Genre: Accidental Bondage, Accidental breath-play, Bad Guys Made Them Do It, First Time, Fuck Or Die, Mutual Pining, Pining, Plot-Induced Nakedness, Sex Pollen, working together
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-21
Updated: 2018-12-21
Packaged: 2019-09-20 02:35:53
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,930
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17013957
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jehane/pseuds/iberiandoctor
Summary: Bruce needs undoing, in more ways than one.





	Gift-Wrapped

Christmas in Metropolis was a different animal to Christmas in Smallville. The bright lights of the city were even brighter this time of year; the winter air — filled with the aromas of roasting chestnuts and Starbuck’s juniper lattes and freshly-felled pine trees propped up in people’s living rooms — smelled almost as sweet as the air above the open fields of Kansas.

Clark Kent walked through the late-night shopping crowds with a spring in his step. His co-workers always teased him about getting excited about the holiday season, but he enjoyed the ritual of picking out gifts for them, and, you know what, they didn’t seem to mind.

Then, above the sound of holiday gridlock and Dean Martin and the tens of thousands of human heartbeats, he heard the proximity alarm go off at the Fortress of Solitude.

The parcels fell to the sidewalk (he’d make it up to Lois and Perry later). Civilian clothes stashed in a nearby alley. In the time it took to inhale, Clark was in costume and the air and streaking toward the Northern Lights. Another breath, and he was landing in the Arctic snow.

Someone had gotten there just before him.

Batman lay on his back in a small, smoking crater. His cape had caught fire, its jets and mechanism broken beyond repair. 

Clark felt a heart-stopping nanosecond of panic before he realised Bruce was still breathing.

That breath was unsteady, Bruce’s heart pounding at almost double its usual rock-solid metronome. He was unconscious, and there were foreign objects bound tightly around his limp body.

His own heart pounding, Clark stripped off Bruce’s smouldering cape and jets and took stock. 

Green vines snaked around Bruce from foot to jawline, pinning his wrists and ankles together and secreting a corrosive fluid that was slowly melting through his armored costume. One of the tendrils was stuffed into his slack mouth and down his throat, gagging him. A jaunty purple ribbon circled his waist, as if someone with a sick sense of humor had decided to gift-wrap the Batman and air-drop him on Clark for Christmas.

But there wasn’t anything remotely humorous about the device clamped around Bruce’s neck. Its unfamiliar molecular signature was a cousin to depleted promethium’s; its shell enveloped a hair-trigger mechanism that looked like it could deliver several metric tons of compressive force. One wrong move, and it could take Bruce’s head clean off. 

There were three more minutes left on the device’s timer. 

There was no time to waste. Clark swept Bruce into his arms and bore him into the Fortress. The lab computer would help him determine the safest way to release Batman from his restraints.

Bruce was awake in the second it took to get him inside. His eyes were glassy; he didn’t seem to be able to focus on his surroundings, or to recognize where he was. As Clark laid him down on a nearby bench, he started to struggle.

“Bruce, it’s me!” Clark was about to add, _You’re safe!_ , before he realized it wasn’t entirely true, and amended this hastily to, “You’re going to be okay! Just hang on.” 

Bruce made a muffled sound. Automatically, Clark reached to pull away the tendril that was stuffed into his mouth, but froze as Bruce gagged violently, body convulsing against the vines.

“Okay, okay!” Clearly brute force wasn’t going to work. Clark used his heat vision to cut the ribbon around Bruce’s waist, which was when he discovered someone had replaced Batman’s belt with the purple one more usually worn by the arch-villain Edward Ngyma.

If the Riddler had conspired with Poison Ivy and other villains to capture the Batman, the Fortress’s computer wasn’t going to be of assistance. To deal with Nygma’s deadly, quixotic conundrums, he’d need the Batman’s help.

Bruce continued to struggle; Clark wondered if he should slap his friend, but decided to try reassurance instead. He pulled off Bruce’s cowl, combing out the thick shock of hair and stroking his cheek, until the fight ran out of him and he subsided against the bench, panting through his nose.

“Bruce, listen to me. You’re caught in at least three different sets of traps. You need to help me figure out a way to get you free.” 

Bruce’s blue eyes focused as Clark’s words finally sank in. Clark was suddenly struck by the notion that his enemies might have planted Batman here as a Trojan Horse attack on the Fortress and on Superman himself — if so, maybe one of the traps would spew Kryptonite. 

Firmly, he put the concern to one side. “First things first: we need to get this collar off you.” Two minutes to zeroing out. “Not sure the heat vision will cut through promethium. I’m going to try to freeze the trigger mechanism instead, sound good to you?”

Bruce made a thoughtful noise that suggested Clark could give it a shot. Clark did so, careful to avoid the rapidly-expanding areas of exposed flesh as Bruce’s costume continued to disintegrate, but the ice breath didn’t seem to affect the trigger mechanism, which seemed shielded against his vision in some way. In fact, the ice made the countdown speed up, which notified them both that they had a minute and a half left.

Bruce frowned in thought, and twisted his bound fingers in the direction of his utility belt. Clark said, “Riddler swapped your belt with his. You think he left the key in there?” It was, after all, the kind of thing Ngyma would do, leaving his victims with the means to secure their freedom tantalizingly just beyond their reach.

Bruce shrugged as Clark dug through the various items in the Riddler’s belt. A blindfold, a dog whistle, miniature thumbscrews, a small phial with the chemical structure of plant-polymer-based lubricant, latex condoms. No keys, unless you were looking for keys to a very different kind of lock.

“I can’t work out if these things are meant to be clues, or more traps, or if the Riddler just has a very active sex life,” Clark muttered, and Bruce rolled his eyes. _One more minute._

Bruce surveyed at the items, and then narrowed his eyes at the dog whistle. Clark didn’t think the Riddler had a pup, and didn’t want to think about whether the man was into pet play. 

Clark turned his vision away from the collar’s trigger to the composition of the collar itself. The thing must have been put on somehow, and it must come off in the same way, mustn’t it? Through the haze of the shield, he thought he could make out a join that comprised a single ice crystal, no wider than an eyelash, which might be sensitive to vibrations at a certain pitch…

…that was it. Clark pursed his lips, and ran up and down the ultrasonic scale. When he reached 65.5 kilohertz, and the count on the timer reached five seconds, his ears detected a click at the lower edge of his own hearing range.

In the blink of an eye, he found the sliver of the collar’s latch. He ripped the thing off Bruce’s throat, and he wrapped it in his cloak, and hurtled through the nearest skylight into the night.

Relief had made him complacent, and just that touch too slow. The collar’s shield had indeed concealed a Kryptonite core. The blast tore through the crystal and the nanotech of his cloak, and ripped the strength from his body, and Clark dropped like a stone.

When he came to, he found himself lying on his back in the Fortress’s main hall. Snowflakes drifted slowly through the open skylight onto his forehead like little pieces of his lost planet.

Someone cleared their throat familiarly, very close to his ear. Clark realized three things at the same time — that he was lying with his head against Bruce’s thigh; that Bruce had managed to get himself across the hallway to where Clark had landed, but was otherwise still tied securely in Poison Ivy’s vines, and that Clark himself was entirely naked. 

Clark sat up hastily. The Kryptonite bomb hadn’t done substantial damage, apart from to his costume’s nanotech; a couple of hours and both he and his suit would be back to full strength. 

He wasn’t sure he could say the same for Batman, who’d been freed from only one set of bonds. Bruce was breathing as heavily as before, his pulse as rapid. Not for the first time, Clark wondered what particular poison it was that these vines were pumping into his friend’s body.

“Bit of a detour. Sorry about that. Your buddies laced the bomb with Kryptonite, but it was nothing I couldn’t handle.” 

Bruce smirked a little, as if to note that most detours didn’t involve Superman’s impenetrable costume being exploded off his body. Then Bruce’s gaze took in that consequentially-bare body, and unexpected color crawled up his neck. 

Belatedly, Clark recognized the other physiological changes that had taken place in Bruce’s own body. Under the circling vines and the rapid disintegration of his costume, Bruce was flushed and sweating and monumentally, helplessly aroused. 

Clark felt himself blush, too: so, it was _that_ kind of poison.

It could be that Ivy was up to her old tricks — she had never been the most stable of villains, and Clark knew that over the years she’d veered from being in love with the Batman to wanting to kill him, and occasionally both things at once. But the frozen crystal bomb looked like it was a collaboration between the Riddler and that cryogenic-love-obsessed scientist, Victor Freeze, and Clark couldn’t help but think that there was something more to this ambush than just three of Batman’s enemies conspiring to get him out of the way so they could undertake another run-of-the-mill criminal heist.

Which meant there was another plan behind these traps — that threatened Bruce’s life, that manipulated his libido, and ... what else?

No use speculating for now. There’d be time enough to discuss motivations after Clark got Bruce free.

“Okay, so let’s try to undo these other things. I think we established brute force won’t work… Maybe we should switch it up. What do these plants like?”

Bruce rolled his eyes again. In response, the vines tightened almost sinuously around Bruce’s body; his nostrils flared as he struggled to breathe, and the vascular pressure in his veins increased to levels that were hazardous even for him. 

Clark took hold of the vines, testing their strength. Maybe ripping them apart would make the poison explode everywhere, but if he could get the right leverage, he might be able to slide them off without hurting Bruce …

As he ran his hands over the hot, turgid surfaces of the plants, he felt them shudder, as if his touch was actually pleasing to them. Experimentally, Clark touched the vines again, more gently this time, and there was an echoing groan from Bruce that the vine in his mouth couldn’t muffle.

“They liked that!” Clark stared into Bruce’s eyes, which had clouded over, the lids heavy, and was struck with sudden realization. “…And so did you, didn’t you?”

Bruce swallowed, and then he nodded, almost reluctantly.

Clark’s own throat felt unaccountably dry. He started to massage the vines and Bruce’s exposed skin, sliding his fingers up and down Bruce’s bound body in long, soothing strokes, and he felt the plants’ death-grip start to loosen.

“I think it’s working,” Clark said, as he turned his attention to the thick tendril crammed down Bruce’s throat, gently caressing the vine and then Bruce’s face. Bruce’s skin was even hotter than the plant’s surfaces, and, before he could stop himself, Clark found himself tracing the outline of Bruce’s parted lips.

This time, Bruce’s groan made no secret of how aroused he was. 

Clark didn’t stop to second-guess his instinct. He pulled on the tendril, gently but firmly, and this time it slid in a slow, wet trail out of Bruce’s mouth. 

Bruce gasped and coughed; his lips were red and bruised, glistening with saliva and the aphrodisiac fluid. Clark wiped them with hands that were inexplicably unsteady. 

The plant hadn’t released anything else, restraining Bruce’s chest and arms as securely as before. Bruce was uncharacteristically silent. His jaw was working, his mouth set in a compressed line; he seemed to be holding on, with tremendous effort, to his usual stoicism, as if he was trying and failing to deny something he desperately needed. 

“Tell me what to do next,” Clark found himself saying. His heart was pounding. He thought he knew what Bruce needed, but he wasn’t going to risk their friendship without being entirely sure that it was something Bruce _wanted_ , too. 

It was something Clark had himself wanted for a long time, after Bruce had brought him back to life, and had taught him to fight alongside him rather than against him. Bruce was the one person alive who knew everything about him — the strength that would never be enough, the tremendous pressure he faced every day, the loneliness and darkness and survivor’s guilt that he kept hidden from everyone else. Superman’s duty and burden, his calling to guard and protect, wasn’t something that could be easily understood and it was less easily shared, but it was a thing he shared with Batman. 

They never spoke about it. Batman was even more secretive and solitary than Superman was: the reinforced walls that guarded the tragedy in his life had never been breached. Bruce Wayne would flirt with romance and could approximate affection, but as far as Clark knew, Batman had never once let himself be vulnerable with anyone. 

Which was clearly why he was having such a hard time now. Left to his own devices, Batman would never have asked for assistance; he would have rather have dealt with the sex pollen on his own and let himself go into cardiac arrest than allowed someone to help him.

Clark wasn’t going to let him do that, of course. He put his hand on Bruce’s face, watching as his friend wrestled with himself.

“Come on, Bruce. Teach me.” 

A shudder ran through Bruce, and then he said, hoarsely, “Come here, then.”

Clark leaned down and clasped Bruce in his arms. He pressed his lips to Bruce’s in a slow, tentative kiss, giving both of them room for a hasty retreat. Bruce hesitated for a moment more, his body stiff with restraint, and then he opened his mouth and let Clark in. 

Clark pressed more deeply into the kiss, and felt Bruce finally give in to his state of drugged arousal, kissing back in a wet, urgent slide of teeth and tongue. Clark didn’t need to breathe, but Bruce’s fierce hunger made him breathless all the same, the thunder of Bruce’s heartbeat pulsing through them both.

As he held onto Bruce, the tendrils that bound Bruce’s wrists and limbs began to release their grip. Clark kept embracing him, losing himself in the kiss, their bodies pressing hot and insistent against each other, until, finally, the vines loosened and the last remnants of the insidious green bindings finally came undone.

They were so caught up in the kiss that they didn’t immediately grasp that Bruce was free. When Clark made this discovery, he tried to pull away, only for Batman’s arms to come up around him, holding him in place.

Bruce was breathing unsteadily, his mouth red and swollen, hair in disarray. The drugs had wound his arousal up to a fever pitch. His voice was steady enough, though, and as dry as it had always been. “That worked well. Nicely done, Superman.”

“I had the best teacher,” Clark muttered. He fought down the urge to dissemble; it would be impossible to hide the fact that he was sporting a hard-on that was as thick as the Daily Planet’s anniversary edition. 

He wasn’t going to let Bruce dissemble, either, not after what they’d just done. “Look, I’d never have wanted it to happen like this, but I don’t, at all, regret it happened. I hope you don’t, either, and that you want this as much as I do.”

Bruce exhaled sharply. The plants’ venom had eaten through most of his armored suit, the remnants of which he now shrugged impatiently away. Clark didn’t look down, but he could feel the evidence of Bruce’s need pressed against his hip. A need fed by aphrodisiacs, a need that Bruce was still struggling to hold back, as well as what Bruce wanted, which Bruce was, also, still trying to keep contained. 

At last, Bruce seemed to reach a decision. He smiled his faint, wry smile, so different from the plastic one he showed to the cameras. “We’re not home free yet. There’s one more thing that needs undoing.” He reached down, casually, and took hold of Clark’s bare hip.

“Really,” Clark said, with some effort, but without surprise — after all, any self-respecting sex pollen trap could generally only be undone via _actual sex_. “Your villains must either be incredibly sadistic, or they must think Batman _really_ needs to get laid.” 

Bruce snorted. “Probably a combination of the two. Also, there was the Kryptonite, which tells me this was a very specific kind of sex pollen trap, designed to be undone by one person. And these three guys would definitely enjoy the notion of Batman having to beg Superman to fuck him or he’d die.” 

He curled his large hand around Clark’s dick, which had, in the last few seconds, gotten impossibly harder. Into Clark’s ear, he murmured, “They’d never suspect this, though — that I’ve always wanted Superman. That I thought I could never tell him what I wanted.”

“What do you want?” Clark’s tongue felt too thick for his mouth; he clutched Bruce’s shoulders to keep from falling over sideways as Bruce began, very slowly, to stroke. It was shockingly good, as if nobody had ever touched him that way before, and in truth, nobody ever had. “You can tell me, Bruce.”

Bruce was silent for so long that Clark thought his friend might have changed his mind, though he could smell the desire that curled up from Bruce’s sweat-damp skin. Finally he said, “It’s something I never thought you’d ever want.” He gently traced the line of Clark’s balls, making them tighten. “I want you to undo me. I want to fuck you, I want you to ride me till I can’t walk. I want it all, every last thing. I never thought you could want it, too.” 

Clark had forgotten once again to breathe. The open longing on Bruce’s face was like a physical blow. To know his friend had wanted this for so long, as much as Clark himself had wanted it… He reached out and took Bruce’s face in his hands.

“I do want it. I’ve wanted it for a long time. Tell me how to undo you, Batman.” 

“Stroke me,” Bruce said, and Clark did, running his thumb over Bruce’s cockhead, spreading the leaking beads of precome along the length of Bruce’s dick, and then stroking him slowly until he was shivering all over.

“Too good,” Bruce panted; it was probably more the drugs than anything, but Clark felt a thrill to know such a simple touch was enough to make the Batman come apart. “Your turn, Superman. Tell me what you want.”

Clark didn’t think Bruce would want to use the lube and condoms that had been stashed in the Riddler’s belt, and he didn’t have to. Krypton’s last son carried the Codex within him, and that Codex prepared Clark for his lover. When Clark guided Bruce’s fingers to his hole, they both groaned aloud to discover he was soaking wet.

“Seriously? Ivy’s drugs have nothing on you, Kal-El. Get over here.”

“Where do you want me?” Clark teased. Bruce sat up and hooked an arm around Clark’s waist and lifted him bodily into Bruce’s lap, and Clark soon found his body crammed full of Batman’s huge, insistent cock. 

“Am I hurting you?” Bruce asked hoarsely. For a moment, Clark couldn’t respond. Bright light streaked across the full spectrum of his vision; Bruce’s dick claimed him so completely it drove all the breath from his body and took his words away.

When he regained his ability to speak, he said, “You never could. Do your worst, Bruce, I’m not afraid.”

 _You should be,_ Bruce’s eyes said, clear as day, though Bruce didn’t say it out loud; he didn’t say anything as he started to thrust into Clark’s body, carefully at first, and then, as the aphrodisiac started to rise through his blood in earnest, much less carefully. 

Clark bit back a cry. The pleasure was so intense it was almost painful, in the way that Bruce’s death-grip would never be. The words spilled out of him in a rush. “I could never be afraid of you. I want to make this good for you. Teach me how.”

Bruce groaned again. His breath was coming harder and faster, his hands clenching Clark’s hips with a desperate strength that could have broken any human man in two. “You don’t need teaching, Clark,” he gasped. “This is so good.”

Clark took a moment to marvel at the sight of his friend losing control at last. Bruce was bright red, covered in sweat, the small muscles in his belly and thighs shivering, making no further attempts to stifle his moans as he rammed himself into Clark’s body again and again — finally, completely, coming undone.

Clark wasn’t drugged with sex pollen, but he might as well be with how quickly he’d come to the edge of his own control. He began to roll his hips, rocking himself against the bowl of Bruce’s groin, riding him as he’d said he wanted. “Like this?” he asked, taking Bruce’s earlobe between his teeth.

“Fuck, yes,” Bruce panted, and squeezed his eyes shut as his orgasm slammed into him. Clark struggled to keep his eyes open as he, too, went over the cliff; he couldn’t stop watching Bruce’s face, open and unguarded in this singular moment of release.

It took a while to return to themselves in the aftermath of pleasure. Bruce was shaky from the aftereffects of the poison. Clark held him gingerly, both thrilled and terrified at once by what they’d done, and where they were going to go from there. 

Of course they still needed to get Riddler and Ivy and Freeze squared away, but after the villains had been returned to Arkham, how were Superman and Batman going to deal with this?

“Don’t worry,” Bruce murmured, at last. “I think you got all the poison out.” 

Clark pressed a hand to Bruce’s forehead, though he could see that Bruce’s fever was subsiding, could hear Bruce’s heart rate and venous pressure returning to normal. Bruce’s mouth quirked; he didn’t mind any excuse to continue to make physical contact, either.

“You might be right. But we should make sure that all adverse effects have been completely undone.” Clark hoped Bruce couldn’t see him blush in the darkness. “Let’s say we take five, and then we could test it again... And, you know, again? Even if it isn’t strictly necessary.”

Bruce snorted. In the low lights of the Fortress, his expression was, for once, completely transparent, his eyes bright — like an unexpected gift that Clark had never expected to receive this season, or any other.

Maybe they'd be all right, after all. Maybe they'd find a way to make it work.

“You’re right, Superman, it’s better to be totally sure,” he drawled, and pulled Clark close again.

**Author's Note:**

> Navaan prompted _Teach me how to undo you_. Her wish, my pleasure ;)
> 
> The Fortress of Solitude in DC comics canon is popularly located [in the Canadian Arctic](https://dcuniverseonline.fandom.com/wiki/Fortress_of_Solitude). In having this line up with the DCEU movieverse, I've assumed Clark (with the help of the JL and Star Labs) had it excavated post- _Justice League (2017)_ from Metropolis’s Heroes Park and relocated it to its comicverse vicinity, and that Batman’s rogue gallery of villains pursue Batfleck across universes ;)


End file.
